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Just another WordPress.com weblogSun, 22 Feb 2015 16:03:14 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.com/Comment on Disrupting the establishment from within by Cordeliahttps://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/disrupting-the-establishment-from-within/#comment-126
Sun, 22 Feb 2015 16:03:14 +0000http://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/?p=2917#comment-126Really interesting S. London is a good example of what happens when we worship at the altar of Plutous. I believe HMRC guidelines gives suspected tax fraudsters 60 days to make a full disclosure and cooperate or face a criminal investigation. Loop and hole comes to mind xxx
]]>Comment on consuming life by Disrupting the establishment from within | Sparkhttps://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/consuming-life/#comment-125
Sun, 22 Feb 2015 15:12:19 +0000http://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/?p=42#comment-125[…] Now it’s not often you see people disrupting from within. Yet this week, we’ve had Peter Oborne (former Chief Political Commentator of the Telegraph) taking on the free press, and the Church taking on politics. How unlikely do these skirmishes sound! Yet taken together they are a wake-up call about the corrosive effect consumerism is having on our civic life, and a plea for politics to start recognizing this damage (for two brilliant thinkers on this, check out Michael Sandel’s accessible Reith lectures, and Zymund Bauman’s less accessible Consuming Life). […]
]]>Comment on hello again hinterland by Be yourself, with skill* | Sparkhttps://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/hello-again-hinterland/#comment-123
Wed, 28 Jan 2015 11:38:44 +0000http://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/?p=2900#comment-123[…] Just another WordPress.com weblog « hello again hinterland […]
]]>Comment on evidence based or intelligence driven policy? by Jeremy Crumphttps://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/evidence-based-or-intelligence-driven-policy/#comment-79
Thu, 14 May 2009 20:46:59 +0000http://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/?p=289#comment-79Sophia

The SILK paper which you refer to in your post ends with a quote by Louise Casey. I was at the event where, glass in hand, she made the threat to deck members of the No 10 policy unit. It remains the most memorable police dinner I have been to. I still have my suspicions as to who recorded Louise’s after dinner speech and gave the tape to the press but, rather like in American Beauty, where by the end of the film everyone has a motive to murder the character played by Kevin Spacey, so just about all the assembled Home Office researchers and ACPO research leads might have thought ill of Louise that evening.

I exclude myself from the suspects though – I thought what Louise said was really challenging. Her subsequent work has not eschewed evidence by any means. Engaging Communities in Fighting Crime (aka the Casey report) is supported by IPSOS-MORI, GfK and other surveys of the views of the public on their engagement with policing and crime issues, as well as focus groups, public meetings etc. I think Louise’s point, which is the one you make, is about the nature of evidence and research. There is inevitably a conflict between long-term, large sample surveying with peer review to follow at the end and the demands of political cycles which require early demonstration of action. There is indeed a positivist aspect to a lot of evidence based policy making – based on a belief that the facts are accessible, as long as the research design is right and the sample size is big enough, and that the policy solution will be derived relatively straightforwardly from their interpretation.

I wonder if a possible driver for this is the conflation in the official mind of evaluation of what works – which calls for a systems understanding of interventions if it is to have real value – and the accountability agenda. Typically, a project is expected to identify some projected benefits before it starts and then to gather evidence, preferably quantifiable and financial, to demonstrate to the auditors that those benefits have been realised. This kind of reporting on delivery of projects is necessary and desirable, up to a point, to show the taxpayer what he or she got for their money. But it isn’t the same as gathering evidence for future policy making and we need to distinguish between the two.

I think that the research community in government is getting more realistic about things like delivery timescales for research. It is less obvious that there is very much non-positivistic methodology being developed in any systematic way. I urge my colleagues to get more ethnomethodological when I can. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that we also still need a lot more well-founded evaluations of the efficacy of specific interventions. The randomised control trial has its place and there have been too few rather than too many in parts of the public sector. We wouldn’t want to undergo medical procedures if we didn’t think they had been properly tested before going into general use. Should the same apply to educational innovation or changes in policing methods, for example, where the recipient of the service may have little choice but the impact of change can be profound? The challenge is in arriving at consensus about what is the right approach, and then about the authority and significance of the results.

I think I have ended on a call for more research…

]]>Comment on in a world in which information is like air, what happens to power? by ewellburnhttps://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/in-a-world-in-which-information-is-like-air-what-happens-to-power/#comment-78
Thu, 14 May 2009 04:44:37 +0000http://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/?p=312#comment-78I just watched the video and truly feel that it provides a hope for the future. As an educator, I know the positive potential is there, but will require nurturing.

Can we model this in K-12 education? in colleges and universities? Can our learning environments be dynamically constructed with our learners and include the greater public to become engaging and collaborative places of ongoing formal and informal personalized learning, preparing citizens for their larger participatory roles in the future?

A challenge, yes — but what amazing rewards if we meet this challenge!

b.t.w. on my MacBook, the hashtag is the number 3 with the shift key #

]]>Comment on in a world in which information is like air, what happens to power? by Nick Marshhttps://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/in-a-world-in-which-information-is-like-air-what-happens-to-power/#comment-77
Wed, 13 May 2009 18:35:33 +0000http://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/?p=312#comment-77Alt three = #
: )
]]>Comment on evidence based or intelligence driven policy? by Alfred Graceyhttps://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/evidence-based-or-intelligence-driven-policy/#comment-76
Tue, 12 May 2009 13:07:51 +0000http://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/?p=289#comment-76Sophie – what’s your evidence for those assertions?
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]]>Comment on the good society by On needs « Mindappleshttps://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/2009/02/02/the-good-society/#comment-75
Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:33:20 +0000http://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/?p=272#comment-75[…] Tagged happiness, needs, policy, policy young foundation, richard layard, sophia parker Nice post here from my friend Sophia about new approaches to the question ‘what constitutes a good life […]
]]>Comment on bruno latour on design by Jonathan Baldwinhttps://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/bruno-latour-on-design-and-social-responsibility/#comment-70
Sun, 22 Feb 2009 10:02:29 +0000http://sparkthinking.wordpress.com/?p=279#comment-70I supervised a student dissertation on ethics in design and we hit upon the idea of doing a “mock” longitudinal survey to see how attitudes change as designers move from being students to being professionals and then progressing up the career ladder.
Some of the interviews were quite depressing – the attitude that you can’t teach ethics came out very strongly, especially from people in industry. (Interestingly, I find that there’s a similar rejection of the idea that you can teach creativity, so go figure!).
There seemed to be a confusion between the idea of ethics as “what to believe” (which it shouldn’t be) and ethics as “how to develop a set of beliefs” (which is what it should be). The former is political and leads to resistance. The latter is about conscience.

Even among students there is a strong rejection of the idea of ethics and in my own research I put this down to what I call “filters” – some students reject any aspect of the curriculum that does not match preconceptions, or seem aligned to the idea of getting a job.

The former is from a “convert” who just happened to come along to the session.

What came out of the session was that while some staff wanted to take things slowly, others and many students wanted a revolution. Sustainability should be a criterion for assessment in every project, not just one or two. There should be a move away from excessive use of paper and printing, environmentally damaging dyes etc.

There are interesting things going on at the University of Illinois (http://illinois.edu/) led by Eric Benson (he showcased his ethical design module in London last summer), and at RMIT in Australia, led by Russell Kerr. Along with Savannah College (who are hoping to host an event on design, ethics/sustainability and the curriculum later this year), and us at Dundee, they’re forming a shared vision of how to embed ethics in the design curriculum.

Going back to the student dissertation, it was interesting that as designers moved towards the end of their careers they appeared to be less anti-ethics. It seems that financial independence, or lack of worry about where the next pay check is coming from, lead to less resistance. Plotted as a graph over time, I expect resistance to ethics is a sad curve, a frown. We need to turn the frown upside down – or get rid of the curve altogether.

I think that you are right to point out that design and designers need to grapple both with ethics and language. I’m not sure I think that the ethical responsibilities of designers are so very different from those of other professions.

The need to develop a language of design is what ought to be one of the subjects of what could properly be called design thinking.

Hugh Dubberley and my colleague Paul Pangaro both worry about and work on these questions.